How to Build Your Own Web Site ?

There are hundreds of web sites on the Internet. More and more people have them. This could be to promote your off line business, run an online business or just have a platform to air your views on your favorite subject. Either way, if you are an internet user there may come a point when you want your own website. This could be in many forms . This article is going to specifically deal with generating your own site from scratch.

First we need to know how to go about even starting your own site.

Domain Names

A domain name is the first thing you will need to get a site up and running. A domain name is the address that people will type into the address bar to access your site. This will start with the www - e.g www.mysite.com. Domain names need to be unique so finding one that is not too long and very catchy is going to be tough. Do a search on Google for Domain names and you will find several companies that offer them. You can search if the domain name is free and buy it for a minimal amount of money.

Domain names have different extensions on the end of them. You have probably noticed.com and .co.uk at the end of sites. There are several different extensions you can choose from. a .com is generally more expensive as it applies worldwide. A .co.uk is a UK extension so would be ideal if your site was targeting a UK audience. Not to say that a.co.uk site cannot get a worldwide audience though - it is more the fact that people can easily notice you as a UK site. There are other extensions that you can only opt for if you meet the criteria. a .edu is only for educational establishments and a .ltd.uk is only for limited companies - so as you can see there are restrictions.

Once you have bought your domain name you need to think about hosting.

Web Hosting

This is where your website will live. A domain name on it own will do nothing - a hosting package will link your domain name to some files for the world to see. There are many different types of hosting available - some cheap, some expensive. If you are just starting out then generally the cheapest will do the job quite nicely. You may find the people that you bought your domain from offer hosting as part of a package but I would advise shopping around as price varies a lot. For a start I would suggest that a years worth of hosting would cost you no more than £25 ($50 approx). It is important to note that the attaching of your domain name to the hosting package and indeed the creation of the domain name can taker up to 48 hours to complete.

Building your site

So now you have everything you need to build your site. Here is where you now have many options available to you depending on what you want your site to be about and how you intend to manage it. For the purpose of this we are going to assume that you just want a simple page up there so when people visit your site they can read some information about you or your company. To allow us to do this we need to understand a bit of HTML – HTML may sound scary but it really isn’t It stands for hyper text markup language and allows you to create a very basic webpage in something like your notepad editor that comes with windows.

There is an alternative to this. This is called a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. It makes creating webpages very easy. There are some free WYSIWYG editors but for the purpose of this article we are going to assume that you do not have access to this and we will stick with HTML. Our next article will talk more on how to create the HTML document from your notepad.

Olly is the webmaster for several websites including a Computer Monitors store and another store selling Cheap Guitars for the UK.